The Opinionated Bastard

So you feel Bush lied us into Iraq? That he wasn't just wrong about the WMD?

I'm not going to lay all of this at his feet, no.  It was a group effort.  A largish group. 

There were so many times during the lead up to this whole thing when Bush would look into the camera and speak to me, the American public, and my overwhelming impression was that he was lying to me.  Yes.  To me.  That's what I'm left with.  And it pisses me off. 

Thing is, I can't really disagree with this. Many pro-war bloggers didn't find the President credible either. Here's what I think (though a commenter actually said it here):

Ultimately the Iraq war was about dozens of things.

It was about the nexus of WMD and terrorism, with Saddam being #1 on the list (a history of material support to various terror groups AND a history of using WMDs in prior actions).

It was about the fact that Saddam was a proven hostile threat to American citizens and interests (assassination attempt on Bush 41, attempts to blow up Radio Free Iraq in Prague, bombings of American cultural centers in Philippines and elsewhere, etc).

It was about the ability for America to display its strength, after the display of weakness that was 9/11 (OBL strategy depended on a non-response as a central part of his call to war, and our winning two wars in his neighborhood effectively muted that call--this is massively important towards eliminating future strikes, btw).

It was also about the establishment of democracy in the middle east. By and large the societies are closed and repressive, with very little social mobility, cultural mobility, spiritual mobility, economic mobility, etc. All the hostility and frustration produced from that has to be directed somewhere--with democracies it can get directed inward, while monarchs and theocrats always direct it outwards, onto the “other” (which is us and israel, typically). Preventing another 9/11 really comes down to changing the chemistry of the region.

There are dozens of such reasons. I would suggest that people read the congressional authorization for war in Iraq, which cites ~22 “reasons” in the form of WHEREAS clauses.

One thing he's not mentioning is the whole oil-for-food scandal with the UN, which made the issue of whether Saddam currently had WMD moot, he was going to be able to get some within five years.

That's what I think, here's what I speculate:

1. Saddam had a high-level leak in his government. That leak was telling us that Saddam had WMD, because Saddam was telling all but 2 of his generals that right up until a month before the invasion. (In other words, he was bluffing, but it was a lame bluff.) There's an interesting book called “Saddam's Bombmaker” I read by the guy who was head of his nuclear program until 1995 when he defected. It documents both how easily Saddam was duping everyone (we had no idea), and how freaked out the US government was when we started debriefing him. 

2. There's something going on with Iran. I'm working on a long piece called “Friction” in the style of Bill Whittle that talks about Iraq and touches on this, but basically, if you look at this map:

Look at the countries that surround Iran and look at which countries we've been allying with or invading lately... Think perhaps we're surrounding/containing something? 

 Read this short interview with Porter Goss (new CIA head) especially the first question:

WHEN WILL WE GET OSAMA BIN LADEN? That is a question that goes far deeper than you know. In the chain that you need to successfully wrap up the war on terror, we have some weak links. And I find that until we strengthen all the links, we're probably not going to be able to bring Mr. bin Laden to justice. We are making very good progress on it. But when you go to the very difficult question of dealing with sanctuaries in sovereign states, you're dealing with a problem of our sense of international obligation, fair play. We have to find a way to work in a conventional world in unconventional ways that are acceptable to the international community.

Is it just me, or does the phrase: “very difficult question of dealing with sanctuaries in sovereign states” seem like a broad hint Osama is in Iran?

So for me, the Iraq war came down to this:

Like most of the pro-war faction on the blogosphere, the WMD justification for the war seemed weak to me. Weak enough that I assumed that the President had other reasons for going to war. 

The anti-Bush crowd immediately assumes that the reason is evil and so it had something to do with oil, or Halliburton. I've talked before about how I don't find that particularly credible for lots of reasons. If we wanted oil we could just buy it: Ultimately, all oil comes from London or Chicago Board of Trade. That is, you can't eat oil, and so the Arab nations are going to end up selling it to us. We buy oil from Iran, and we don't even have diplomatic relations with them. As for Halliburton, the big problem with that theory is that it hasn't really affected their bottom line. They're a publically traded company, so you can check it out, their symbol is HALL. 

The pro-Bush crowd assumed that it had something to do with 9/11. I don't find that belief credible either because the Administration actually stated in no uncertain terms that Iraq had nothing to do with 9/11 on several occasions. The exception is Cheney, but he's had such a hard on for Iraq for so long that everyone in the administration seems to automatically discount everything he says about them. 

So what I am left with is the belief that:

The President knows something he's not telling us. 

Now whether you're ok with that or not probably depends on your opinion of Bush in general. If he was say, Clinton, most Democrats would be ok with that. If you're playing Stud Poker (and Stud Poker is probably one of the best analogies out  there for international diplomacy) you don't turn your hole cards face up on the table until the hand is played out. 

Many people would not be ok with that, no matter who is in office. We have President Johnson and the Gulf of Tonkin to thank for that I think. I can understand that point of view, but I also know that much of foreign policy has to be done in back rooms and dark alleys. I don't like it, but its the way of the world. 

For me, I'm ok with the President not telling us everything, for now. So President Bush is getting the benefit of the doubt from me. Partially, this is because I can see how Iraq fits into the bigger picture of the Middle East. (The long post I'm working on.) Its also because that while it seems like Bush has proceeded stubbornly forward despite his critics, most of those critics have been proven wrong in the end. The Middle East is ready for democracy and Iraq of all the countries in the Middle East was strangely the most ready for it. The critics said otherwise, I remember them using word like “quagmire” early on in both Afghanistan and Iraq, where a more reasonable critic might have merely said “difficult and expensive”.

So under all the screaming between the right and the left, I guess it comes down to faith. Its not necessarily faith in President Bush either, but rather faith in our government, in our soldiers, in our State Department that they are somewhat reasonable people. So far, given the people I've met and talked to over the Internet in those categories that seems a pretty easy faith to keep:

• I believe that no matter what some guy in Washington 7,000 miles away says, that an American soldier will fight harder to free people then to oppress them. This has been borne out by listening to soldiers talk about sleeping under bridges in Iraq so that more neighborhoods could participate in the election.

• I believe that bringing freedom from tyranny is a reason to go to war in its own right, especially with a nation as central to the Middle East as Iraq. The events of 9/11 just make that more obvious.

• I believe that a President would not willingly suffer all the slings and arrows he's had to suffer due to the war without good reason. He went from 80% approval to 50% and a good chunk of that was caused by Iraq.

• I believe that the people in the government who are there administration after administration, who work in the CIA, NSA, etc. have a sincere desire to protect America from foreign threats but can only do so much. 

• I believe that the Iranians are friggin' nuts.

• I believe that Saddam was friggin' nuts, and an idiot to boot.

• I believe that the Congress, which was fully briefed, made a rational choice when they voted to authorize the war.

• I believe that Clinton tried to do what he could with Iraq, but he could only do so much without committing boots to the ground.

So in the end, I think that you and I will have to disagree. But I think we've hit the key issue:

• I have faith that the President is a reasonably decent man (for a scumsucking politician), you seem to have faith in the reverse. 

So perhaps we're just members of different faiths.